Jacqueline Lewis, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminology
Nobuko Fujita, Learning Specialist in the Office of Open Learning
“Prior to COVID-19 I had been reimagining the ways I approach teaching to better respond to the evolving ways students learn, as well as their changing interests and needs,” says Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor.
Pressbooks, a versatile, easy-to-use publishing platform, was used to create the textbooks. The platform allows authors to embed multimedia (video, audio, images, etc.), add interactive learning activities with H5P, and choose how to share the book (open access or private, multiple download file options).
Lewis’ Psychoactive Substance Use and Social Policy and On Death and Dying combine readings and multimedia resources from a variety of sources to stimulate students’ critical thinking and reflection on complex and challenging issues. Both resources have been adopted by other instructors through the eCampusOntario Open Library. Pressbooks allows instructors to clone the texts to adapt to their own teaching context. For example, Lewis clones her texts to incorporate different versions into online and hybrid course offerings.
Pressbooks also helps collaboration among authors, editors, and those with other roles. Graduate students Jill Holland-Penney, Jacqueline Durocher, and Brendan Bernardin collaborated with Lewis and one another as “student partners” in the co-creation of teaching and course design process (Bovill, 2019). Feedback from undergraduate student reviewers and an expert in equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigenization were incorporated into the texts.
To learn how to leverage Pressbooks and other digital pedagogies and technologies for your teaching, registrations are now open at:
https://ctl2.uwindsor.ca/openlearning/workshops/
A built-in analytics dashboard in Pressbooks allows authors to track visitors and page views for their texts. To date, Lewis’ texts have amassed more than 17.8K total visitors and 71.4K total page views.
References
Bovill, C. (2019). A co-creation of learning and teaching typology: What kind of co-creation are you planning or doing? International Journal for Students as Partners, 3(2), 91-98. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i2.3953
